I just went for a walk in the rain. It was nice and mellow. Nothing with me, no keys, no wallet, and best of all, no cellphone.

Anyway, here’s some nice links to lists of all time greatest movies.

The mother of all lists of course is the IMDB Top 250. IMDB has been around forever! …it’s been on the web since 1993 which is like before the web even existed. Basically any movie on this list is worth watching. And it’s the popular choices, as opposed to the critics, so they aren’t just chosen for originality or historical significance (like some of the below) but rather because they’re good to watch.

For the “critics choices” you can use the Best of Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes has to be one of the worst named websites of all time. But no matter. The problem with the all time list is that it includes movies that are loved by critics but aren’t necessarily very watchable. However, they have a useful feature which is to see the top movies by year. For example here is the top 10 for 1969 (I’ve seen 5 of the 10 so far…). It’s a cool way to explore cinematic history.

For more critic’s lists, try the British Film Institute top 45 list. And here’s more detail on their top 10. And then there’s the American Film Institute top 100 (linking to wikipedia because the AFI site requires a stupid login).

And finally here are a few more from random publications:

Well, that’s enough of that. It’s interesting to see the differences in the list. Is the best movie of all time The Godfather? Casablanca? Citizen Kane? Or as IMDB users would have it, Shawshank? (I don’t think so…). Forget about the latest releases. Watch the classics.